In the realm of operating system, application design and other fields, the need for a powerful and flexible search facility to search a user's storage frequently arises. A user may wish, for example, to search his or her hard drive to locate all files of a certain type or extension, such as “.doc”, “.jpg”, “.memo”, “.report” or others to pull up documents to edit, print other manipulate in other ways. A user may likewise wish to search for files based on associated metadata, such as file size, or date created or modified. A user may at times also choose to search for files based on internal file content, such as desired text or numbers. The need to efficiently initiate and carry out these searches becomes particularly acute when the user is attempting to look through a large quantity of files or data. That situation may apply for example when a user is examining a national customer list in a CRM package, or updating contacts files or shared documents within a large corporation or other organization. In other cases, a user may wish to sort or search through a collection or catalogue of musical, video or other media or file material. Some search tools and facilities have evolved in response to large-scale file search and other requirements.
For example, some applications and other packages may present the user with an input box type of search interface, where the user may enter search terms such as file extensions or other attributes, or in-file characters or text. As the search, for example through a local hard drive and associated file system, progresses, files which partly or fully match the entered attributes or text may be displayed to the user to select or manipulate.
However, existing search tools may be constrained by certain limitations in usability or functionality. For instance, even such search tools as exist merely present the results gathered from searching the client or other file system at the current level or point in the file system hierarchy. So if no results are found in a given directory or folder, the user may be required to restart and reenter another search in another directory or folder, even when using the same search terms. Likewise, existing search tools do not permit the concurrent execution of searches on both file attributes (extension, name etc.) as well as deep or internal file searching, for instance to match text strings. Other problems in file management and search technology exist.